Why am I twisting myself in knots over a woman who has no intention of hanging around longer than a few months? I should be elated, shouldn’t I? Not looking for reasons she wants to keep things casual between us.
But as I’d held her under me last night, her pulse wild against my thumb and the air between our lips, swirling and somehow elemental, I’d experienced some inexplicable shift. I didn’t mean or expect it to happen, but I suddenly knew without a doubt that I’d drifted out from a safe harbor without realizing, beyond the breakers that buffer my ordinary life. I wasn’t looking outward, and I wasn’t looking back. I was looking down, and Amelia seemed so soft-eyed and compliant, yet I asked myself how I’d ever missed the depths of her. My fathomless need of her.
“Fuck!” I slide my phone from the table, stare at it, then hurl it at the wall as hard as I can. The back ricochets off, the screen cracking like ice on a pond.
Worse, it doesn’t make me feel one fucking iota better.
But it does encourage a slow, sarcastic round of applause from behind me.
“Well done,” Beckett murmurs in that annoyingly modulate tone Englishmen of a certain age and station seem to have perfected. “I’m assuming it had offended you in some way?” His expression bland, he glances behind me at the wall. “Or perhaps it was the bearer of bad news.”
“Nothing like that,” I mutter as I trudge across the conference room to retrieve the pieces like a naughty schoolboy. “I’m just a bad-tempered arsehole today.”
By the time I turn, Beckett has pulled out a seat at the contemporary conference table. He loosens the button on his bespoke suit jacket before lowering himself to seat at the head of the table. “Only today?”
“What?”
“You’re bad tempered only today?”
“Yeah?” I feel myself frown.
“It seems to me that you’ve been out of sorts since your very capable PA left to give birth. Joanne, I think?”
“Jody.” Beckett is a stickler for details but only when they pertain to him.
“And the new girl?” He pulls a of small case from the inside pocket of his Savile Row suit, opens it, then begins to clean the lenses of a pair of rimless spectacles I know he has no intention of wearing. They’re new, according to Olivia, his wife. Also, according to her, he’s far too vain and stubborn to wear them. “What’s her name again?”
“Mimi.”
He tsks and lowers the specs to the table. “No.”
“No?”
“Mimi is the name of a Pekinese or something equally as fluffy and yappy.”
“Amelia. Her name is Amelia,” I say, dropping the broken bits of my phone to the table.
“She’s a friend of the family, I think.”
I’ve no idea how he knows. Or why he even cares. “Yeah. I was friends with her brother. He died a few years ago. What’s this about, Beckett?”
“It just strikes me that you’ve been a little distracted since she arrived.”
“Bullshit. How am I distracted? I’m here, playing good cop to your bad one. We’ve raised the capital and support we needed today, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” he agrees, “we have.”
“And I was there with leading counsel last week when we had that sit-down with the FCA.”
“You mean when we were handed our metaphoric arses by the Financial Conduct Authority?”
“Teething problems,” I insist. He waves my words away.
“Yes, that’s all fine,” he says as though I’m boring him. “But this person stood in front of me? Do sit down. I detest being looked down upon.”
With a snort, I pull out the chair to his right. “Better?” I mutter pointedly.
“Much. Thank you.”
